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In the weekly and daily grind of cranking out compelling email content, it’s easy to forget to take account of your email marketing strategy and performance as a whole. We all probably know roughly what our week-to-week click rate looks like. But are we missing opportunities to help drive up that rate?

I propose that a little email marketing spring cleaning is a good idea. Your account will look cleaner and less cluttered. But the real benefit will be in better results for your email marketing strategy.

Four Ways an Email Marketing Spring Clean Can Improve Your Results

1 // Re-Discover Forgotten Things

Triggered campaigns, whether one-off messages (such as a welcome campaign) or part of a drip series, are often pretty effective even without a lot of maintenance. As a consequence, it’s easy for marketers to set-and-forget them. Start your spring clean by taking an inventory of your triggered messages.

Do the messages and calls to action still align with your email marketing strategy?

Review campaign performance with an eye for any steep declines in engagement after a particular message in a triggered series. Don’t assume, by the way, that the message with the lower engagement is the problem. Consider the possibility that the previous message was off the mark and your subscribers stopped looking for good content from you.

Take a look at your campaigns from a content standpoint. Can you categorize them by the type of content? For example, do you have some image-heavy campaigns versus messages that are predominantly text?

If you send newsletters or updates, can you sort your content into categories, such as a self-promotional (example: we launched a new feature) versus selfless (example: helpful tips with no real explicit self promotion)?

The point of all this is to find a way to compare one type of content to another. Then look at your engagement metrics. It’s a good bet that you’ll find that some types of content perform better than others.

Your data may be telling you something that you just weren’t listening for. Send more of the content that performs well. As much as possible, throw out the stuff that doesn’t work.

3 // Identify Things You Didn’t Know You Needed

Part of every spring clean is discovering a new way to use what you have. In email marketing, a spring clean can help you find untapped opportunities for segmentation.

Look at your lists and segments. Did you set up lists you never really use? Do you send all of your campaigns to the same lists all the time? You might be missing opportunities to send more relevant content to smaller segments of your list. You have data on your individual subscribers’ engagement behavior (opens and clicks) and you likely have other information such as purchases and demographics.

Instead of sending one campaign that must appeal to everyone on your list, can you send more relevant versions of your message or offer to smaller groups? The reward for your extra effort will likely be better campaigns that get better results.

4 // Organize for the Future

The last step in any spring clean is to re-organize for the future. All of these tips have focused on taking the long view of your data and your campaigns.

Tip: Did you know you can change the internal name of a campaign after it's sent?Learn how.

To make sure you have an easier time tracking your performance, I suggest a small, but important change to how you manage your email campaigns.

Use a consistent internal naming convention for your messages. Build into the internal name you give to your campaigns keywords and tags that you can later use to compare campaigns against each other.

For example, if you regularly send promotions and offers as well as blog updates, be sure to label each type of campaign so it’s easier later to compare blog updates against each other. You’ll have a better sense of how each type of campaign is performing if you can segment your data.

The idea is to make sure you have an easier time tracking your results over time so that you don’t have to do a full spring clean the next time you want to take account of your email marketing.